How to Make Your Own Drum Sheet Music Tabs

Written by john shelley

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Drum tabs are like sheet music for drummers. (drums image by agno_agnus from Fotolia.com)

Drum tabs (or tablature) is a method of noting what a drummer plays in any given song. They notate the timing of the piece, as well as the percussion played, and how it should be played (how hard the drum should be hit, for example). Drum tabs can be thought of as basic sheet music for drums, they can be written by hand or by using any word-processing software that uses the ASCII code: Microsoft Notepad or Apple's TextEdit, for example.

Skill level:

Moderate

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Things you need

Word-processing software

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Instructions

1

Familiarise yourself with the tablature abbreviations for the basic drums and cymbals:

The letters and numbers below the tab are used to indicate timing, with the numbers being the on-beats.

Note: this drum tab is for a simple beat, using only the snare drum, bass drum, hi-hat and crash cymbal. To create a drum tab for a more complex beat, simply add more drum abbreviation(s) and a corresponding line(s).

4

Enter the drums that are played, in the time that they are played. The opening bars to the verse of The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go" would be as follows: